B2BiQ

Allen Martinson joins us and discusses customer driven robotics. Originally submitted into a NASA contest, a former Skype co-founder and a team of Estonian engineers built the original technology. After some initial trepidation, Allen, a venture capitalist at the time, came on to advise the project as he bought into the moonshot business plan based on the technologically advanced team. Allen describes autonomous delivery as a solution to the biggest waste of time in human history. He describes the product as a mobile phone on wheels. Now in 60 cities and 15 countries, Starship is delivering goods to customers all over the world. After 4M human encounters the team is realizing that customers intuitively understand how to interact with the robot.

Recorded at SSOW, Lee Coulter joins us and takes us through his career and resulting philosophy. He learned a key lesson very early on- say what you’re going to do and do that. From GE he learned how to be completely analytical yet not go overboard. From AON, he realized that the move from one organization to another was more of a culture shock than moving from the US to Asia. On moving to Kraft, he was brought on to undo a long-term infrastructure integration that had just been completed. He says he’s had 5 once in a career opportunities- one of them being lifting rugs and move rocks that never get lifted or moved. What he found there and throughout his career in automation, he’s brought forth to his current work with IEEE.  

Bill Ashton joins us and lets us know that Jessica Alba in fact does come into the office every day. He explains that she is the ‘why’ person. He on the other hand is the ‘how' person. The Honest company had been growing quickly in e-commerce getting the brand into Target after 3 years. About 6 months later Bill joined the team. He truly learned logistics in the military. He worked for Federated in the hay day of department stores eventually moving to Ralph Lauren and experiencing the growth of that brand over the course of the ensuing 15 years. He takes us through how Ralph Lauren the person actually executed on the vision of producing timeless quality while delivering on premium customer service. After stops at Restoration Hardware and Bare Essentials Bill continues to do just that at The Honest Co.

Recorded at Next Generation Customer Delivery, Deepa Gandhi joins us and shares that the 13 year old version of her wanted to be an engineer but later realized an interest in international studies which turned into a job in finance which has turned into a career in fashion. Deepa eventually came together with her partners Melissa and Jesse who were looking to create a more functional, less expensive bag. At Wharton, Deepa took advantage of being a student by traveling to Spain and China to identify best practices for supply chain management operations under the guise of studying. And so, she's been laser focused on managing inventory and product pricing from Day 1. With a primarily millennial work force, Dagne Dover has discovered a flat organization and Deepa takes us through how they make it work. One key is having the entire organization manage towards one metric. 

Matt DiGeronimo joins us and shares that he’s used to rolling up his sleeves and managing people in a closer vicinity. Now that he’s at a few arms length he’s got a dashboard that provides him visibility into each plants production, efficiency, reliability and safety. With that snapshot of those four elements he can comfortably proceed with the rest of the day. After retiring from the Navy, Matt was recruited to run a plant in Kansas City by a fellow former submarine officer. He realized very early on that he was hired to actually shut down the plant. Thus began an 18 month journey of turning the plant around. Blessed with a dedicated and professional team at the plant they did just that. Matt says that he knew he didn’t have all of the answers…but that he knew that they did.